Archives for February 1, 2013

It was a warm day in May when I walked in the doors of the unlabeled entrance to Blizzard HQ, hidden deep in the heart of a school campus. After the usual couple hours of HR paperwork and contract signing, I was brought upstairs to the WoW team floor and deposited in the middle of the hallway/meeting room where the other game designers were sitting.

They were excitedly discussing the plans they had in store for the final boss of Karazhan, a 10-man raid instance – the first of its kind for the team.

Afterwards, I was introduced to the future lead encounter designer, Scott Mercer. Scott had worked on Starcraft as a level designer and was responsible for a ton of the itemization work that had been done in classic WoW. (See Shard of the Flame ala Ragnaros)

Recently replaced as item designer by the notoriously handsome Travis Day, Scott was now responsible for the newly formed encounter design team, which would focus on raid and dungeon bosses, as well as providing support to the quest team for outdoor spawning.

Scott didn’t expect to see me. To be honest, almost no one did – I’d been hired after a long lunch interview with the Gang of Three design leads (Pardo, Chilton and Kaplan) about a week before.

The second day, someone in IT brought up a computer for me from the QA dept and set me up inside a small office next to one of the production QA members, a friendly guy named Stuart Massie, who was responsible for collecting testing requests and writing the patch notes. Stuart helped me setup my machine, taught me how to use the internal wiki tools and introduced me to Alex Tsang who helped me setup WoW Editor.

Then, I was off!

… but what on earth was I supposed to do? I stumbled over this question for a bit when a voice interrupted me.

“Well, hello Mr. Brazie. Let’s get you started.”

I spun around to see Scott wander in. A warm and friendly, if occasionally sardonic, guy, Scott shared my love of the Japanese language and was an expert on all things k-pop.

“So, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really expecting you already, but I’m glad to have the extra manpower. We’ve a got a lot ahead of us.”

Scott sketched a rough layout of Karazhan on the whiteboard behind me. It read as follows:

[Demon Island]

– CUT

[Tower Top]

Demon Boss – Geoff

Nether Wyrm – ??

Chess Game – Pat

[Library]

Archmage – ??

Golem – ??

Satyr Summoner – ??

Bone Dragon – ??

[Opera House]

Little Red Riding Hood – ??

Romeo and Juliet – ??

Wizard of Oz – ??

[Entry Hall]

Maiden – Joe

Butler – Joe

Horseman – Scott

Animal Bosses – ??

“We need to get all of these bosses done by the end of summer. The good news is we’ve got plenty of time to pull it off. Since you’re new, I want you to focus on learning the tool. It’s old, its weird and it takes a long time to master. So, I’m giving you a boss I’ve already designed and want you to focus on implementation.”

Me: “So what’s his name?”

Scott: “Attumen the Huntsman”

… and so began my life as a raid boss designer.

The Plan

I grabbed a yellow notepad and jotted down the notes Scott provided as requirements:

Starts out attacking the horse

Attumen runs in when his horse is hurt.

Mounts the horse when either one of them is low.

Horse should charge other people randomly.

Attumen is a ghost so he should be hard to hit sometimes.

Attumen should be faced away from the group, has a shadowy cleave attack.

Attumen should get pissed off when you disarm him.

Starting Out

Looking back, it’s a great idea to start out by implementing someone else’s idea. It lets you focus on learning the execution, rather than fretting heavily of “what” to do. I gleefully ran around the tool, mostly confused, attempting to copy and paste various pieces of existing monsters to create Attumen.

When one reaches 50%, both despawn and a new Attumen + Midnight creature spawns at 100% health.

Analysis:

So what’s the state of this design?

At first glance, this seems to satisfy the requirements of the design. However, it has a number of issues. Which ones can you spot?

Answers:

Midnight’s design doesn’t quite work. Charge rushes to a target, which means you want to pull Midnight off an enemy. However, the primary target stun means it is difficult for the tank to build an hold aggro on the boss.

Attumen’s design is incredibly frustrating. The chain attack means the tank + 2 melee characters will always be hit by the Shadow cleave. This means there’s nothing your melee characters can do to avoid it. When Ghost form is activated, you cannot do anything to stop it. Furthermore, Disarm, which should help the player instead penalizes them.

Finally, there’s no reason to attack both Attumen and Midnight. When either one reaches half, a new creature spawns. This means all threat is lost and all damage done is lost.

Iteration

Iteration is the process of improving a design to achieve a goal. In the case of games, the goal is to make the experience more satisfying.

Version 2:

Midnight was spawned as a static spawn inside of the livery.

Midnight has one ability – charge and knockdown

Charge – rushes to one of the three most distant targets and fixates on them for a couple seconds.

Uppercut – now an appropriate flavor attack, this has no actual bearing on most tanks, but retains the feeling of change when Attumen is disarmed.

Intangible Presence – now a curse, it can be removed by Mage or Druid players.

Merge – the fact that it preserves the damage taken from the other incarnation means multi-target DPS’ers such as Warlocks or Rogues now have their bonus damage preserved.

Can we do better?

Yes, yes we can. There’s a lot of issues that remain with this design (which is the one that went live). At the time, I didn’t have a process to use to analyse and detect these issues. However, I really want you, the reader to understand this.

Take my process and apply it to these two mechanics: Charge and Intangible Presence.